FG Restates Commitment To Fight Against Corruption – Garba Shehu
Presidential spokesman, Malam Garba Shehu, says President Muhammadu Buhari’s administration will fight corruption to a standstill in spite of strong resistance by some individuals and groups.
The Senior Special Assistant on Media and Publicity to the President, who made this known in a statement, stressed that “the war against perfidy and corruption by the Buhari administration would not stop despite the opposition against it in some quarters.”
The Presidential aide maintained that the President declared rooting out corruption as one of the cardinal policies of his election campaign and will not relent in his effort to end corruption.
He said: “Those, whose illicit ways of accumulating money have been stopped, will criticize this government, but all that will not derail the unfaltering commitment of the President, Muhammadu Buhari’s administration to the war against corruption. He is aware that this was one of the main reasons why Nigerians in their millions put their trust in him; the main reason they voted him into power in 2015.”
Shehu further said the President is determined to keep that trust of ordinary Nigerians who voted him into the office. “He has vowed to give corruption a good fight. He will not let them down,” he said. The Senior Special Assistant admitted that so far, the battle to uproot corruption from Nigeria has not been easy.
According to him, corruption has been fighting back vehemently, finding accomplices in various forms and guises, but reassured that the Buhari administration will not relent.
He said: “Nothing will return our country to those sad, old days of wanton thievery that have plunged us into the economic mess from which Nigeria is currently recovering. The war against corruption in Nigeria is one of those clashes between good and evil, where good is determined to triumph.”
Shehu dismissed the insinuation that some members of the governing party, the All Progressives Congress APC, were being spared in the ongoing campaign against corruption.
Malam Shehu disclosed that upon directives by the President, the National Hajj Commission had carried out an audit of accommodation agents in both Makkah and Madina in Saudi Arabia as parts of measures to promote transparency.
He revealed that a savings of more than $16.7 million was realized from the exercise. He also lauded those fearless ordinary citizens for embracing the whistleblower policy by taking extraordinary risks, to expose corruption in the society.
On the ongoing relocation of international flight services to Kaduna Airport, the presidential aide challenged the government and people of Kaduna State to device ways by which the social and economic benefits brought to the state will not depart the city after the rehabilitation of the Abuja airport.
He acknowledged the Minister of Power, Works and Housing, Babatunde Fashola, with the record of being the first ever Minister to ride on all the federal roads across the nation.
